Risk of Using Ghostwriter - Duplicate Content Penalty
The other night when I was searching for blogs in my related niche using Technorati, for generating traffic through blog commenting, I came across my published article. It’s altered a little bit but I still recognized it. Worse, no credits are given, meaning I don’t get back link from that article and I suffer duplicate content penalty.
I posted this article in my Law of Attraction blog on May 3, 2007. Then I posted my comment on that blog that used my article. Nothing harsh, really…
It’s definitely one of the best post that I ever read.
Because I wrote it!
Here’s the correct way to use others’ articles:
“You have permission to publish this article electronically or in print, free of charge, as long as you leave the article title, author name, body and resource box in tact (means NO changes) with the links made active and you agree to our posted publisher terms of service.” ~ EzineArticles.com
Surprisingly, the owner of that blog sent me an email immediately, and here’s his explanation:
Hi Aldian,
Sorry for publishing a twisted copy of your article on my blog. It was not intentional. Let me explain.
I am a SP protege too and I understand that duplicate content is not good for my site.
I hired a ghostwriter to write 10 articles on LOA and this article is one of the 10 submitted by him. To check for original content of his articles, I used www.copyscape.com to check each article and I found 2 articles has duplcate content. BUT check on this article fail to warn me about duplicate content. This is the result: “No copies of this page were found. Click below to search for copies of other pages on your site:”
When I saw your comment, it puzzles me as I have verified with copyscape.com before I published it. You may want to confirm my checking result. I just checked again it returns me with the same result - no copies of this page were found! I am still puzzled of how this content escape being detected to be a copy of your article.
Nevertheless, I have deleted this article from my blog as I hate duplicate content. Sorry again for this unintentional act.
Having known this is done unintentionally, he was also cheated by his ghostwriter, and he deleted my article from his blog, I let this matter drop. However, to prevent incident like this, I suggest you to read Ghostwriting Goldmine by Lorette Lyttle before hiring ghostwriters.
Now, what’s the relation between back link and content penalty?
Recently, Matt Cutts, the software engineer of Google, actually said that your site will not be penalized so long as the syndicated articles link back to the source site. This means that article marketing as a strategy is still sound if article directories include a resource box with a link back to your site.
(I quoted the above from Evelyn Lim’s blog where she shares a good tips on how to avoid duplicate content penalty.)
That means you must get your author resource box with an active hyper link back to your site on your every distributed and republished articles to prevent duplicate content penalty. But problem lies with the ghostwriters who recycle their old articles and if you happen to hire them. Hence, before hiring any ghostwriters, you must learn and understand the ins and outs of ghostwriting 
Comment by Zul on 18 July 2007:
writing is about ethics. If we don’t understand what it means, might as well we don;t do it. It’s better to write with bad english, grammar and all rather than write a perfect but copied article.
Comment by Aldian on 19 July 2007:
Well, Zul, bad grammar also causes problems, too. I usually ask my English native speaker friends to proof read my articles for me
Comment by Ben on 19 July 2007:
Once I let a guy take up a project cause he bidded really cheap. I knew it was a bad idea but did it anyway.
In the end 10 articles failed copyscape miserably. It was a good lesson for me to learn lol
Comment by Aldian on 20 July 2007:
It’s great that you’ve learned good lesson from that horrible experience, Ben.
It’s true that experience makes us wiser
Comment by Carol King on 20 July 2007:
Hi Aldian
Zul, I definately know what you mean about bad grammer. Recently I was asked by another blogger if I would like to swap links. He suggested writing an article for me to post on my blog and I would do the same.
I agreed because I thought it would be good to swap links and get content for my blog as well. I sent my article to him (with no errors)
but when I got his I had to literally re-write it just so that it would make sense, it was not just bad spelling it was total gibberish.
When I contacted him to let him know that he should check his articles before sending them to anyone he said, and I quote ” I thought you would check it before posting it too your blog so I figured there was no sense in doing it twice”
Unbelievable!
Have a great weekend Aldian.
Comment by Aldian on 21 July 2007:
Hi Carol,
Wow, that’s pretty unique experience. It was better for him to just sent you his bullet points rather than gibberish articles.
Have a great weekend Carol!